Launch Angle Analysis - Potential HR Risers

March 14, 2021

Jon Anderson identifies potential home run risers and draft sleepers for fantasy baseball based on launch angle and Statcast figures from last season.

With the onset of Statcast data, we can now better predict which hitters may be due for a power surge. Before recent years, we only had things like hard-hit rate and home runs per fly ball ratios to look to as predictors of future changes in home run rates. Now that we have launch angle, we can go a step further.

In this post, we will highlight some names that have been hitting a bunch of balls at angles that are conducive to home runs without seeing high home run rates themselves. We cannot do this without first knowing what angle range we're looking for.

I went into the Statcast data and isolated every home run (leaving off the inside-the-parkers) and checked the distribution of the launch angles of those balls. Here's what that looks like:

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Launch Angle Distribution

The launch angle sweet spot is 28 degrees, and it decreases steadily as you go in either direction from that angle. The range I am choosing to isolate here is between 25 and 35. About 70% of home runs fall in this angle range, so if you want to hit a bunch of home runs, these are the launch angles you're trying to accomplish.

Here are the overall leaders in this category, restricted to batters that have at least 200 balls put in play over the last two seasons. What you see here is the percentage of each hitter's balls in play that came in this angle range.

Optimal Fly Ball Rate

Next, I filtered this list down a bit. I added in ADP, maximum exit velocity, and each player's PA/HR rate over the last two seasons (league average is around 27 for that category for your reference). I restricted this to only hitters that have a maximum exit velocity at 110 or above since that is a pretty good indicator of players that have the ability to hit a bunch of home runs. Here are the names I'm most interested in for the purposes of this study:

There are some great values on this list if you're fishing for home runs late in the draft. Joey Gallo, Adam Duvall, and Paul DeJong stand out as three of the best names to catch your team up in home runs later on in the draft.

This is also good news for bounce-back candidates like Yordan Alvarez, Gleyber Torres, and J.D. Martinez.

That list is comprised of names that most people expect to hit home runs though. Let's add another filter on and restrict this to only hitters that haven't hit homers at a high rate in the last two years. Looking at only hitters with PA/HR rates of 25 or above:

These are names that I would not be surprised at all to hit homers at an above-average rate moving forward now, and most of these names are coming very cheap and/or have another category they're really strong in.

I think DeJong, Taylor, and Aguilar are really great guys to target late in the draft to add on some pop. You could really see those three taking a step even further and reaching a level higher than what we've seen recently from them in terms of hitting the ball out of the yard.

The other most interesting names here are Anderson, Mondesi, Albies, and Turner. Those four are guys that don't need to hit a bunch of homers to be valuable fantasy contributors, so the fact that they profile as potentially adding on more homers makes them really intriguing in drafts.

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